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Premature burial, also known as live burial, burial alive, or vivisepulture, refers to the act of being buried while still alive.
Animals or humans may be buried alive accidentally on the mistaken assumption that they are dead, or intentionally as a form of torture, murder, or execution. It may also occur with the consent of the victim as a part of a stunt, with the intention to escape.
A gallows (or less precisely scaffold) is a frame or elevated beam, typically wooden, from which objects can be suspended or "weighed". Gallows were thus widely used to suspend public weighing scales for large and heavy objects such as sacks of grain or minerals, usually positioned in markets or toll gates. The term was also used for a projecting framework from which a ship's anchor might be raised so it is no longer sitting on the seabed, riverbed or dock; "weighing [the] anchor" meant raising it using this apparatus while avoiding striking the ship's hull.
In modern usage the term has come to mean almost exclusively a scaffold or gibbet used for execution by hanging.
The Gemonian Stairs (Latin: Scalae Gemoniae, Italian: Scale Gemonie) were a flight of steps located in the ancient city of Rome. Nicknamed the Stairs of Mourning, the stairs are infamous in Roman history as a place of execution.